


A Pool Among The Rock

by 20thcenturyvole



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: M/M, and also Dragons, spiritassassin, this was meant to be a supernatural AU but ended up more a medieval fantasy AU, warning for livestock getting slaughtered, you've definitely got witch!Chirrut though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 07:19:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10531611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/20thcenturyvole/pseuds/20thcenturyvole
Summary: Once, it would have been impossible for an occupying force to take the Holy City, for it was protected by the temple, and no army in the wide world could break its walls down.But technology marches on and siege engines improve. The Dragon is dead now, and her Guardians failed her.OR: Baze haggles for sheep, Chirrut casts a spell, and a year makes a heck of a difference.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theplushiegirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theplushiegirl/gifts).



> Okay, so my lovely recipient theplushiegirl asked for "Supernatural AU. Vampires! Werewolves! Witches! Mermaids! Any combination thereof!" I thought, "Ooh, Chirrut as a witch! A sort of hedge-witch, compared to the powerful mages that the Jedi are, doing hedgewitchy things to help out the people of his city."
> 
> It turned into a medieval fantasy AU, entirely from Baze's perspective. I hope this still works for you, theplushiegirl!

It’s two days before the New Year, and the market of the Holy City is heaving with people, a confusion of sights and smells and sounds that batters the senses even more than usual. The air about their heads is thick with steam from breath and sweat and cooking. Baze follows Chirrut through the crowd, annoyed and uneasy; people are preparing for the three-day feast as if hoarding resources before a siege, hollering, haggling, loading themselves down with food and firewood. There’s squealing from the livestock pens. Last year’s lambs and kids and piglets, marked specially for those who bought them at the end of last New Year, have grown fat enough to slaughter for this year’s feast. The gutters are near to overflowing. The stink is unbelievable.

Baze is not used to getting jostled so often – people usually give a large man with a sword strapped to his back a wider berth – but there simply isn’t room for people to steer clear. He’s getting more frightened and apologetic looks than he knows what to do with, and it rankles that he doesn’t have a clear idea of why they’re even here. Baze bought everything they needed days ago, when traffic in the market was still reasonable.

“Do you know which stall you want?” he hollers over the noise.

“No,” Chirrut calls back, as cheerful as ever, “But I’m sure I’ll know it when I smell it!”

There is a loud splash nearby, and people to their right yelp and shove each other out of the way – the gutter has overflowed and sent a wave of runoff from one of the livestock pens flowing over the flagstones. The stench it sends up almost makes Baze’s eyes water, and he pulls Chirrut away before it can soak the hem of his robes. Chirrut makes a face and covers his mouth. 

They come to rest in an alcove between two stalls, one selling spices, the other jars of cooking oil. “Good luck,” Baze says, pointedly.

Chirrut sucks a breath in through his mouth and says, “Well, it’s probably in another part of the market.”

“What are you even looking for?” Baze says. 

Chirrut looks sheepish, which usually means he’s about to say something Baze won’t like and even he knows it. “I don’t actually know,” he says, and Baze throws his hands up in the air. Chirrut thumps his stick on the ground and says, “It came to me in a dream! I just know it’s important.” He sets his mouth, stubborn.

Baze is sure it is important – to Chirrut. That Chirrut, on his worst day, has more faith in magic and wonders and signs from the universe than Baze has on his best is a very old argument, and not worth rehashing. Especially not here, where they’re barely able to hear themselves think over the sound of a woman three feet away ranting about the price of mustard seeds.

So Baze aims for his most reasonable tone and says, “Is it important enough to get trampled by the entire population of the Holy City?”

“Yes,” Chirrut says firmly. His cloudy eyes are darting like they do when he’s thinking hard and not trying to hide it. He leans in close, and says, “Baze, I dreamed of the Dragon.”

Baze goes cold.

Chirrut looks uneasy; there’s no spark of mischief about him. Baze searches his face and finds nothing insincere in it, though he is looking very hard. Chirrut, into the silence between them, says, “I dreamed of her, and I’m sure it was real. I could see her. She looked at me, and I knew I had to do something for her. I knew we had to come here, today. That we’d miss something if we didn’t. I woke up and it didn’t fade. I’m just as sure now as I was in the dream. It’s important.” He squeezes the top of his stick. “Say something. I don’t know what’s happening on your face.”

Baze doesn’t know what’s happening on his face either. He thinks of, and discards, many responses. After a moment, he says gruffly, “Would I know it when I see it?”

Chirrut looks relieved. “You might,” he says.

~

Even away from the butchery pens, the market is still chaos, still crowded, still overwhelming, and Baze has no idea what he’s looking for. But he is looking. A small, terrible thing that lives inside him says that there is nothing to look for, and Chirrut is manipulating him for a whim, or it was just a dream and Chirrut is a crazy man, and Baze is a fool, a pathetic, ageing failure who dogs Chirrut out of some desperate need to prove he can protect someone. Baze ignores it. He listened to that voice once, long ago, in fear, and it led him nowhere good and made both of them very unhappy. Maybe he is a fool and Chirrut is crazy, but at least they have company. So he follows, and he looks.

After an hour, on the other side of the street from Chirrut, he is hit with a memory so vivid it stops him dead in the street. It smells like New Year – not the smell of a feast cooking or candles burning, or even the smell of freshly dyed flags that will hang over the wealthier streets in a few days’ time, but a New Year that hasn’t happened in decades. In between the odour of people and livestock and food stalls, there is a smell like New Year in the holy temple.

Baze had never been part of the Ceremony of Consecration; it was a task for the Masters, whose knowledge of the temple’s mysteries was far beyond that of an acolyte or even a Guardian. He had seen it, though, every year, after midnight as the New Year began: the Abbot with his censer swinging, trailing fragrant smoke, as the Masters behind him wound scarlet thread around the walls and sang in an ancient tongue of the temple’s hallowing.

It doesn’t smell precisely the same. But it smells like nothing else he can think of, and he shouts across the crowd to get Chirrut’s attention. Chirrut, who is not above whacking people in the shins with his stick when they won’t get out of his way, comes quickly. Baze sees the moment that he smells it, too: a grin steals over his face, and makes the crinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen. 

“Where is it coming from?” Chirrut asks. “Can you see?”

Baze looks through the haze of smoke and spots the fine, curling trails of incense smoke. “There,” he says, and takes Chirrut by the hand.

It’s a seller Baze doesn’t recognise, with a powdered face and a fur at his neck; behind him, Baze meets the eyes of a muscular woman, who is sitting next to a barrel, upon which rests a plate of fried chitterlings and a loaded crossbow. The perfumer’s table is laden with sacks of powder, vials of oil, and irregular lumps of resin. Several different samples are burning at once: the smell he came here for is overwhelmed by the ones he didn’t. For a moment, he’s too frustrated to answer the merchant’s greeting, and only glares when the man launches into his ingratiating patter. Chirrut isn’t paying attention. He leans forward, his face intent. He cups his hand around one thread of smoke, as if he can feel it on his skin, and wafts it closer. He trails his fingers through the smoke until they hover above a clay dish full of burning resin. “This one,” he says.

The seller, cut off, hardly misses a beat. “—That one? Yes, that is a fine and rare perfume, unlike any you’ve ever smelled, I am sure, for it comes all the way from—”

“How much?” Baze interrupts.

The answer is a lot. Baze haggles. He’s good at haggling, even when his mind isn’t really on the task, and it isn’t when Chirrut is smiling in his direction like that, a peaceful, joyful look like the kind he gets after a rainfall, or a night of prayer that ended with someone’s fever breaking, or in bed if things have gone particularly well. Baze could, theoretically, give this seller the first figure he asked for, but it would put a sizeable dent in the money Baze got from his last job, and he never knows when there’ll next be one that he can stomach. So he haggles relentlessly, implacably, until the seller is red-faced and his mercenary has abandoned her lunch and gotten up to loom. They get the incense for half the original asking price. Baze counts out the silver coins directly into the merchant’s hand, and then grabs Chirrut.

“Lovely doing business with you!” Chirrut calls out as they leave. The merchant scowls, and then the crowd fills in behind them and blocks his stall from view.

It takes them another quarter-hour to get out of the market, and even then they nearly run into a troop of Imperial guardsmen. Chirrut hears them an instant before Baze sees them. Ten walk down the street in lockstep, their hooked polearms over their shoulders, their white tabards stained with the Holy City’s dust. They are impossible to tell apart – their iron helms cover their faces, and the popular rumour is that they sleep in armour – which means that Baze has no idea if one of them would recognise him or Chirrut from any of their previous misadventures, and doesn’t want to risk it. Baze rather suspects that’s the point of covered faces: it gives the Holy City’s occupying force a sort of fearsome omnipresence, like they’re a hive of ants rather than an army of men. Baze and Chirrut duck into an alcove behind somebody’s house and stay there until the sound of twenty synchronised feet has faded.

They make it into the winding streets of their neighbourhood, where the graceful ancient towers carved out of living rock give way to shambling half-finished things. The building they live in is the remains of an old guardhouse: sturdy, but for the wall that fell down eighteen years ago, and the additional rooms made of wood and mud-brick that bristle on its balconies. Up the narrow stair, worn smooth in the middle by centuries of feet, is their room: one such addition, built into an alcove of the keep, of which two walls are sturdy rock and two are thin wood panels held up by brick piles, with wooden shutters for windows. It’s alright, though – it’s all they need. And it’s what they can afford.

Chirrut sits down on the floor by the hearth and pulls out the pouch of incense, rolling it back and forth in his hands, smiling. 

Baze sits down across from him and stares at the little bag. The surprise of finding the stuff has faded enough for his brain to start working again, and it’s coming up with no plausible use for their prize. “Now what?” he says.

Chirrut looks surprised. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“No,” Baze says. 

Chirrut sets the pouch of incense down between them and spreads his hands around it, a seller’s flourish. “We must perform the Ceremony of Consecration.”

Baze stares at him. Then he gets up and goes to build a fire.

“I don’t mean this New Year,” Chirrut adds. He has the gall to sound exasperated.

“Well, that’s a relief,” Baze retorts, “because we don’t have a flock of sacred sheep, and I have no idea where we’d get one on short notice.”

“We only need one sheep,” Chirrut says. “And it needs to be blessed and fed specially for a year. So we’ll consecrate the temple next New Year.”

Baze groans. It would be easy to buy a sheep on the last day of the New Year celebration – every family with enough money buys a young animal for next year’s feast, and quite a few without enough money do it too, just to maintain appearances – but it’s not cheap. Even if Baze haggles well, and Chirrut settles for the runtiest lamb in the flock, this particular drain on their finances is going to make life very hard for who knows how long.

Baze was never particularly attached to material things, but he learned to hate uncertainty young – like not knowing from day to day when he will eat or where he will sleep. Money erases much of that uncertainty. Hunger and cold make him inclined to take bad jobs. 

Chirrut worries about their finances less. He has always treated their homeless periods like a damned adventure. He has a knack for charming free food out of merchants who know him well, but charm is not nearly so reliable a food source as silver. He sells his spells and fortunes on the street, but it doesn’t earn much: credulous travellers with fat wallets are harder and harder to come by as the Holy City withers; and when locals come to him with desperation in their hearts, and enough money to buy acts of hedgewitchery but not the medicine or justice they actually need – well, in those circumstances, Chirrut does his best, and charges little. Baze doesn’t begrudge him those days. But he keeps a weather eye on mercenary work all the same.

“I know I’m asking a lot,” Chirrut says. “But Baze, this incense is the core ingredient of the sacred fire – there are others, and I will need to collect them, but this is the rarest and hardest to come by. Have you smelled it since the temple fell?”

“No,” Baze says shortly, striking a flint over tinder.

“Have you even seen that merchant before?” Chirrut presses.

Baze wants to say that new merchants are hardly unusual, but that’s not really true anymore. The Holy City used to be filled with pilgrims, and the caravans followed them en masse, but that steady river has dwindled. Baze thinks of the perfume merchant’s powdered face and rich clothes and thinks it unlikely that he will try his luck in their market again. 

Dreams and portents. Baze does not believe in ghosts. If the Dragon still exists in some way, in spirit, what can she possibly think of him? He breaks a stick of kindling and adds it to the hearth, and then breaks a few more to have something to do with the way his hands want to squeeze into fists.

“We’ll get the sheep,” he says.

~

New Year comes, and on the second night there is a commotion on the street outside. Chirrut looks up from dinner with a worried expression, so Baze puts down his bowl and opens the shutter to look. There are Imperial guards down there, and movement: someone is running through the traffic on the street like a marked thief, and disappears under the eaves of their building.

There’s a pounding of feet on the stair, and the rattle of armour, and muffled shouts of command. Baze crosses the room, and just as he opens the door he sees an Imperial guard thrust his polearm up and hook the end around the fleeing man’s throat. With one heave, the man is dragged down the stair and out of sight. It happens in seconds. Baze jerks forward, seeing red, but Chirrut’s hand snakes around his waist and holds him there, unyielding as an iron bar. It halts Baze just long enough to realise that he didn’t recognise the arrested man’s face. It’s nobody from their building; nobody from their street. Chirrut’s voice is urgent in his ear, asking him to describe what’s happening. Below, guards are shouting, their voices distinctively tinny in their helmets. At the top of the stairwell, Pirra the laundress is begging her shrieking children to get inside.

Baze closes his eyes and relays it all. Chirrut’s arm yields, and he presses his palm to Baze’s chest. They stand there at the door, straining like hounds at heel, until the noise of marching feet has faded. Then they go about their neighbours’ houses, checking in.

The man was a third cousin to Keedee down the street, visiting for the holiday, just arrived last night on the northeast road. There was a battle there last night, on the outskirts of the city. An Imperial caravan was smashed to pieces and robbed. There are no survivors. Now the Imperial guards are rounding up witnesses.

The mountain men, Baze thinks. It must have been them – time and time again, it’s them. They think themselves noble, warriors against the Empire instead of a bunch of bandits, as if, even after all this time, they believe that targeting Imperials only harms Imperials. It doesn’t. The Empire’s soldiers love order and obedience; like an anthill, there’s chaos when they’ve been kicked. Guards are moving through the city, breaking down doors, dragging people away from their families mid-feast. 

This is the way it is, and has been for eighteen years. The Imperial guards are not local men: they troop in by the unit from elsewhere, and though they are happy to recruit the people of the Holy City as carters and labourers, they care nothing for the Holy City’s traditions, much less its inhabitants. Once, it would have been impossible for an occupying force to take the Holy City, for it was protected by the temple, and no army in the wide world could break its walls down.

But technology marches on and siege engines improve; the Dragon is dead now, and her Guardians failed her.

~

They buy the sheep. It is indeed small. The good news is that they manage to haggle the shepherd down to a very reasonable price. The bad news is that they manage that because they will not be leaving it with her, to be grazed and cared for until it is fat and grown. No, they’re going to have to do that themselves. It’s a sheep with a special destiny, so it needs special treatment, every day, for a year.

They’re lucky that Chirrut has a friend in Ree Braillo, a tailor with two children, five orphaned nieces and nephews, and a pious father in frail health who does not like to acknowledge how far his family’s fortunes have fallen. They can’t afford an animal for next year’s feast, but they do have a courtyard – grass even grows there – and in exchange for the promise of a significant portion of the sheep when it’s slaughtered, they are willing to shelter it, and let Chirrut come and tend it every day. 

Just as the Holy City has its New Year traditions, so did the holy temple, or perhaps the temple’s tradition was what came first. The temple kept a herd of sacred sheep, and on the final day of every New Year, one would be selected by the Abbot. Over the next year, its wool would be dyed scarlet; it would be blessed, and fed a special diet; its wool would be shorn and spun into thread. Then, on the following New Year’s Eve, it would be sacrificed at dawn. Its entrails would be read for an augury of the coming year. Its suet would be carved off and taken to render for ceremonial tallow. Then the whole, cleaned sheep would be salted, spiced, stuffed with fruits and grains, and roasted; at sunset, it was presented to the Dragon, who ate it in a single bite.

The Dragon always came to the feast. Everyone in the temple ate at that feast. It was a great honour, to be present before her, to feel her gaze, to see her share the celebration. It was a privilege to be one of her Guardians, and to protect her and her home.

But it never does Baze any good to think for long about that. In any case, neither of them can read the future in entrails, and there’s no Dragon to eat the thing, so really they just need it for its wool and its tallow – Chirrut is already talking about which of their neighbours could most use its meat. Baze tries not to think of the ceremony Chirrut is planning as something like propping up a corpse and trying to hold a conversation with it, but it’s hard. He can’t understand how hallowing a ruin can do anyone any good.

Well, except the Braillos. They’ll do quite well out of the arrangement.

They see the sheep to its new pen in the Braillos’ courtyard, and Chirrut says the first blessings over it, which Baze only half-understands. The older prayers of the temple were in a tongue nobody but the most learned monks really spoke any more, and it was never one of Baze’s duties to learn that language. His duty was to fight well, and guard vigilantly. Chirrut had a different path; he took part in the ceremony precisely once, in the last year before the temple fell, but he seems to remember it well enough.

Ree Braillo’s family are gathered on the balcony above, and the children are gawking like children do, watching Chirrut work with fascinated expressions. One of the little girls asks in a carrying whisper, “Baba, is he a mage?”

Baze itches to tell the girl that there were never any mages in the temple of the Holy City. They were trained elsewhere; they had temples of their own. They visited the Holy City infrequently, and only ever to take one of the Dragon’s precious eggs away. They were men and women born with sorcerous powers that allowed them to topple mountains, commune with the dead, and turn men’s minds against them. They were dragon-riders. They ran the world, even if they swore they did not rule it.

There are no mages any more. At best there are hedgewitches, like Chirrut, who knows little household spells whose results look a lot like the results of luck and diligence; who prays over the sick when the medicine has run out, tells fortunes to the hopeful, and warns travellers away from harm. Sometimes, he gets the results he prays for. He takes this as evidence that the universe is fundamentally kind; that it rewards faith, and that all he needs to do is believe. Baze takes it as evidence that Chirrut is kind, and good with people, and those people are sometimes smart or lucky enough to listen to him in time to prevent disaster.

The girl’s grandfather replies, “He is a temple guardian, dumpling. That red on his robe means he is a Master, see? Now hush.”

Baze keeps his eyes on Chirrut, whose entire attention is on the sheep. The sheep is more interested in its food, but that’s no bad thing.

~

When spring comes, marked by only slightly warmer weather, Chirrut goes down into the forest to gather herbs for spells and household use, and for the Ceremony of Consecration, which apparently will require something from every season. Baze goes with him and gathers firewood. 

They are hardly alone. Through the trees, half of which are dying for want of regular rain, he can see woodcutters moving slowly, bent-backed, axes in hand, baskets on their backs. He likely looks the same to them. Nearby, Chirrut kneels in a clearing filled with fogflower, finding the blossoms by touch, trailing his fingers down the stem, snapping them off above the root. Bees investigate his short hair, leaving his head dusted with pollen, and he pays them no mind. Under the leaves, the spring sun dapples him. Baze realises how much time he’s spent looking, and turns his attention back to his own task with some effort.

Trudging back along the road that leads up to the Holy City makes Baze think of this place as it was when he first saw it: the trees under their mantle of rainclouds; the clouds like a sea turned upside-down. He had never seen so much green, or heard so many calling birds, and when their wagon passed through the forest and the rains parted and Baze caught his first glimpse of the city itself, he craned his neck to see its red stone towers, and the temple at its summit, crowning it. He wondered without much expectation if he might see a glimpse of the Dragon. He had not comprehended at first the darker shape that curled around the temple walls like a tree root around a boulder - not until it moved, and he realised it was the Dragon, right there, far larger even than his most wild imagining, with her great head tilted up and her mouth agape, breathing out the clouds that brought the rain.

The forest has shrunk considerably in the last few years. Most of the birds have gone. The Imperial guards began cutting down the outer ring of trees ten years ago, to preserve the aquifers, and have been moving inwards at a steady pace ever since. When the aquifers dry up at last, the city will die. 

But as long as the city’s still here, Chirrut won’t leave. So, however far Baze has tried to go, he always comes back.

~

Near summer, with money running out, Baze gets wind of a job: not Imperial, which is his first criteria, and not obviously immoral which is his second. It takes him almost a month, but he succeeds in retrieving the antiquarian’s stolen treasure, and even manages to avoid serious injury, though the thieves object violently to his interference. They’re a rangy bunch, doing poorly for themselves in this desert hideout; he has no idea where they thought they might be able to fence such distinctive loot. He kills one, when she leaps on him from above. He badly injures another on the way out. At least one of the band is barely more than a child. People are desperate, these days.

When he comes home, the Holy City is in the midst of a fever. Pyres are burning, for the very young and very old who are always vulnerable to such things. He finds Chirrut outside a tent in the square, sprinkling herbs into a pot of steaming water, a row of cups beside him. He is singing a spell in a low, cracked voice. In the tent, the sick lie on pallets on the floor, gasping and coughing. Veiled nurses move between the beds.

When Chirrut hears Baze’s heavy tread, he raises his head, and his smile has grown full and dear when Baze kneels beside him. He looks grey about the edges, shadowed under the eyes. Baze pulls him close, to kiss, and hold him for a moment. Then he lets Chirrut return to his work, and goes to ask a nurse what he can do.

When they finally get back to their room, it is dark, and they are both moving like old men. Baze aches, but it feels good to lay down his sword and pack, strip off his travelling clothes, and lay the bag of coin, satisfyingly heavy, down on the table. He smells like a day of sweat and effort – they both do – so though he really wants nothing more than to reacquaint himself with their bed, he gets the bucket and goes down to the pump for wash water, while Chirrut builds a little fire to heat it.

It’s not until the water is over the fire that he notices the lump under a haphazardly folded sheet in the corner of the room. He puts the empty bucket down and lifts the cloth, and finds an intricately etched silver ball the size of his head, on a length of silver chain.

“Chirrut,” he says.

Chirrut lays down the basin and a jar of soap; he has stripped to the waist. “Oh good,” he says, “Just pour it in.”

Baze doesn’t move. “Chirrut, where did you get the Abbot’s censer?” 

Chirrut shifts, and straightens. “I found it. While you were gone.”

“Found it where?”

“Are we going to wash or not?”

Baze folds his arms. “Not until you tell me.”

Chirrut sighs, as if Baze is being very unreasonable. “I found it in the store-room of the Imperial office by the temple.” At the noise Baze makes, he holds a hand up. “Nobody saw me!”

“Nobody saw you, or nobody saw your face?” Baze asks.

“Well, obviously I covered my face,” Chirrut says. “But nobody raised the alarm. Because I took out the watchmen before they knew I was there.”

“Chirrut!”

“You did your investigating, I did mine,” Chirrut says stubbornly. “I thought for sure they would have melted it down for the silver long ago, but I got talking to Ibini – you know, the street-sweeper up that way, with her bad leg? – and she was talking about how it was obscene that the commander of that office used temple artifacts for decoration. I asked around, and there have been many attempted break-ins at that office. Just no successful ones, until now.” He shrugs. “I stole a lot of other things too, so they wouldn’t think the censer was all I was after. Then I dumped most of it on Tirra Street—”

“So the gangs got temple treasures,” Baze says flatly.

“—And I dumped a few choice pieces over Gurrel Kura’s garden wall,” Chirrut finishes.

Gurrel Kura is one of the most notorious gangsters in the city. He’s flourished since the occupation. They’ve already had run-ins with his people – crashed a few of his worse operations – and the reason they’re not actively on his hit list right now is because Baze and Chirrut managed to beat every assassin he tried sending. They’ve proven too expensive to kill. But that might change if he suspects that Chirrut just gave the Imperial guard a reason to crack down on his gang. 

Baze takes a deep breath through his nose, and pours the warm water into the basin. There is nothing he can do about it right now, no matter what his thundering heart is trying to tell him. “And you’re sure you got away with it,” he presses.

“Very sure,” Chirrut says. “Almost completely.”

Well, that’s another worry to add to their list.

~

By autumn, there are racks of dried herbs hanging from their ceiling: fogflower, suntooth, dropwort, bay. There are skeins of red-dyed wool, too, from their sheep, in a sack to keep the dust off them. Chirrut cleans and polishes the censer and hides it under their bed. 

Gurrel Kura has not tried to kill them, but has been seen around town in a brand new litter hung with gold brocade. Baze tries not to be grumpy that such a scumbag has profited from Chirrut’s hard work. After all, it means that nobody has traced the theft yet. 

The year wears on, and winter comes. The walls of their room barely keep out the wind in winter, let alone the cold, and fuel for the fire gets more expensive every year as the forest shrinks. They get offcuts of cloth from the dyers’ quarter for cheap, and sew them together into a sort of tent they can put over the bed. It makes their nights a little warmer, to have something trapping the heat.

Baze dreams of the Dragon.

He is a Guardian. He watches at the walls. He stands in rain or sun or snow, and does not waver. The temple is his to protect. He is diligent, and he is dedicated, and he believes with all his heart.

A shadow at his right, and his breath catches, though he does not flinch from his position. The Dragon herself is near. The gleaming brown scales of her body pass him as she moves. If he reached his hand out, he could touch her. The shadow shifts; her movement slows, and halts. He risks taking his eyes off the horizon to look upwards and she is looking right at him.

He does not know what to do. He cannot look away. She wants something from him, and he doesn’t know what. She lowers her great head until her gaze is level with his – half her body hanging over the wall above a forty foot drop as if it’s nothing – and Baze thinks her gleaming golden eyes are very kind. Hesitantly, waiting at any moment for her to show her disapproval, he reaches out and touches the scales of her hide. She does not stop him. She is so warm. Her scales are as smooth as polished stone.

Baze wakes up and his right arm is numb. 

It is dim; he can’t see. For a moment, panic seizes in his chest. The dream is slipping away from him – the Dragon was there? What was he doing? He touched her, he thinks, and his arm went numb, and now he can’t move it—

His arm is numb because Chirrut is asleep on top of it. 

Baze blows out a breath, and his eyes adjust; the dimness of pre-dawn is even dimmer filtered through the red hangings above the bed. They’ve done their job: he isn’t cold. He just really needs to move. Chirrut is draped over him, snoring in his ear, his breath hot and damp against Baze’s neck; Baze huffs, and tries to wrestle his nerveless arm out from under Chirrut without waking him up.

It’s an awkward attempt. He tries to slide his whole torso left and up; it doesn’t work, because Chirrut is extremely heavy. Baze grimaces, bent sideways, halfway out from under the covers and starting to feel the cold, when Chirrut laughs and startles him.

Baze recovers. “Get off me,” he says.

Chirrut yawns hugely, and tucks his face into Baze’s neck. “Why are you getting up?” he says. “It’s cold out there. Stay.”

Baze frowns. “I’m not trying to get up; my arm is asleep.”

“So was I,” Chirrut says.

“Get off,” Baze repeats.

“So snippy,” says Chirrut, sitting up. He stretches until his fingers brush the cloth above them. His back ripples, a beautiful display, but Baze is hardly in a position to enjoy it because the blood is rushing back into his arm and it’s agony. He bares his teeth in a hiss and shifts back into place. As soon as he does, Chirrut reaches down to feel where he is, light touches on Baze’s knee, his hip, up his ticklish ribs, fingers skimming his shoulders and face; with exaggerated care, he resettles himself on Baze’s chest like a cat on top of a wall, and pulls the blankets back over them both.

“Good morning, beloved,” Chirrut says.

Baze grumbles, flexing his fingers, but kisses the top of Chirrut’s head and drapes his arm over Chirrut’s back. 

“New Year tomorrow,” Chirrut says.

Baze grunts.

Chirrut is quiet for a moment. Then he says, in a perfectly blithe voice, “You don’t have to come with me, you know.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Baze snaps. “I’m not letting you do it alone.” He rubs little circles on Chirrut’s back, and feels the warm muscles going lax under the skin. He closes his eyes, accepting the weight, holding it to him.

“Well, good,” Chirrut mumbles against his shoulder. “In that case, you can help me sacrifice the sheep.”

~

The cold outside their bed is sharp and bracing. Chirrut dresses in his robes – still robes, looking for all the world like the monk he used to be, though every article of clothing they owned back then has long since worn through and been replaced. He goes to get breakfast, which is to say he goes to beg yesterday’s bread off the baker two streets away, who is so wrapped around Chirrut’s little finger that she’ll no doubt give him a sweet, too.

While he’s gone, Baze makes a fire in the low hearth, which is attached via a crumbling brick pipe to the main chimney of this building. They are low on kindling and won’t get much chance to collect more today, and so, feeling a little foolish, he mutters a prayer over the logs, the one that Chirrut always sings to make them catch more easily. He lights the fire. The logs catch. He is pretty sure it is because he knows how to build a fire.

Baze fills the kettle, hooks it over the hearth, and shakes some cheap and powdery tea into a pot; then he strips the bed, and brings the sheets out onto the balcony to air while he waits for the water to heat.

The is not quite up, but people are moving below: two carters are negotiating loudly about which of them gets right of way; a woman with a broom is shoving an urchin off her stoop; a young man chases, and manages to catch, an escaped chicken. Two Imperial guards walk up the street, on patrol. 

Baze prepares tea, and does not have to wait long; a few minutes later, Chirrut clatters up the stairs, bangs into the room and says, “She had honey bread today! That woman is so nice to me. She deserves some of the sheep.”

The honey bread is good, even if it’s yesterday’s stale stock, and it softens enough when dipped in hot tea to make a very agreeable breakfast. Baze can feel the pressure inside him easing as he eats it, and as he eyes the remaining third of the loaf – he will wrap it up, and they can take it with them to ward off later hunger. Baze was taught that much disorder of the mind is caused by a distraction of the body; he was also taught to push past those distractions. Nowadays, he prefers to deal with them directly, and pre-empt them if at all possible. He likes to be prepared. 

That thought opens the door to a crowd of others: thoughts like a temple layout made uncertain by rubble and years of neglect, or like two patrols of Imperial guards, one at the south entrance and one at the northeast; like a ceremony that’s very difficult to perform inconspicuously; like having no clue what, if anything, will happen. He likes to be prepared, but he knows too well: preparation only gets them so far.

He sets down his cup with a sigh, and says, “Alright. What do we need to do today?”

Chirrut smiles. “First,” he says, “Do you have any clothing you aren’t going to miss?”

~

They go to Ree Braillo’s house just as the sun is rising; Ree, well forewarned, has woken up the family. Chirrut prays in the old, strange tongue, and when the bells toll the hour Baze kills the sheep. He is sure to be swift about it, so the sheep won’t suffer much; Chirrut has grown attached to the thing after a year of daily tending, and is a little sad now that its time is up.

Butchering it is a messy job, and one that Chirrut isn’t really much help at; Ree and an older niece assist Baze instead. When they gut it, Chirrut says, “What do you see?” in a hopeful voice.

They all look down at the mess. “Guts,” Baze says flatly.

“Aw,” Chirrut says.

Ree looks happy, at least. The Braillo family will get the guts and the pluck and the head and neck and front legs, all of which will go a long way towards feeding this many mouths. 

Baze cuts away portions of fat to render for tallow. They cut the rest of the sheep into pieces, wrap them in layers of clean cloth, and spend the next several hours wandering the streets, gifting parcels of meat to their neighbours. By the time they are done – Chirrut goes up to the fifth floor of their building and gives Pirra the second-to-last piece – the blood has set in their clothes and they smell terrible. 

Baze goes to the pump. The first bucket goes in the laundry tub, the second in the kettle, the third in the washbasin, the fourth in the kettle again. Chirrut stores the one joint of sheep they’ve kept for themselves in the cooking pot, and strips to the skin. They soak their clothes in cold water, and scrub themselves in hot, and then sit by the fire wrapped in a blanket until they’re warm again.

“What now?” Baze asks.

“Now, I will prepare the flame of consecration,” Chirrut says. He stands, the blanket pooling around his feet and Baze’s shoulders. He looks determined.

“Dress first, you fool,” Baze says. “You’ll catch your death.” 

Chirrut sticks out his tongue in Baze’s general direction, and goes to put something warm on.

Baze renders the lamb fat for tallow while Chirrut prepares the herbs for the censer. He weaves the suntooth and dropwort together into a kind of basket, about the size of his cupped hand; he lines it with bay, and drops in the fogflower and the chunks of incense resin. Then he weaves the top together into a reasonable mesh and rolls the whole thing in the hot tallow, murmuring a prayer Baze has never heard before. Some old part of him feels a thrill at learning one of the mysteries of the temple Masters, but the rest of him knows that he is going along to this hare-brained ceremony to watch Chirrut’s back, and that’s all. With such practical considerations in mind, he digs out a spent lamp and refills it with the remaining tallow – sacred sheep or not, there’s no call to waste fuel.

Chirrut places the ball on a dish in the far corner of the room so that the tallow can set, and joins Baze in preparing their joint of lamb for dinner – a richer New Year’s feast than they have had in a long while. Hours later, when they have eaten their fill and scrubbed the bowls, the tallow ball has hardened. Chirrut encloses it in the censer with a smile. Baze is pretty sure it’s going to smoke atrociously, and smell like burning sheep fat above all else, but Chirrut would know better than him how the ceremony is prepared.

“Ready?” Baze says.

“Ready,” Chirrut says.

~

Baze has not set foot on temple grounds in fourteen years.

In the first few years of the occupation, he kept going back. He haunted it. He killed a few patrolling Imperials for trooping across grounds they had not shown themselves fit to enter. The temple was in ruins, and the ground was soaked in blood, so there was really nothing for him to guard, but as a Guardian he did not know what else to do. It took only a day for the Empire’s forces to slay the Dragon, take her city, scatter her acolytes, and pillage her lair for its treasures. The destruction of Baze’s way of life happened all at once, but the destruction of his faith was a slower process. The days and months and years passed and he found no explanation for why he had survived. He prayed and nothing answered. He sustained the traditions he had been taught, and it occurred to him, slowly, that they did no good to anyone. He stood on the temple walls and was eroded: every reason he had to stand there, the sun bleached from him, the wind wore away, and the snow smothered.

How he’d hated Chirrut, in those days, for abandoning the ruins to serve the people of the city below. How he’d hated him, for coming up here to talk with Baze of births and deaths and life moving on, while Baze was trying so hard to make time stop. 

Now, Baze follows Chirrut up the hidden paths. There are the main steps, a great long stairway leading up the hill to the temple, but Imperial guards patrol it. They send soldiers up and down it regularly, albeit not zealously, since they’re really only there to stop people squatting in the ruin. They have no use for it themselves, since everything of value has by now been stripped from it, but they also don’t want people en masse using it as a temple. New Year celebrations are one thing; organised worship is another.

Chirrut is quick. He knows the route well, and Baze gets the feeling that only a need for silence is stopping him from dashing up this little tunnel. Baze thinks it might have been a waterway, once – it’s barely more than a yard across, and though it narrows above their heads it still opens to the starry sky. There’s sand underfoot. Chirrut’s wrapped the end of his stick in cloth, to muffle its tapping as it finds the rocks and roots in his path. The chain of the censer is wrapped around his waist, swaddled in cloth so it won’t clink. Baze’s crossbow and its sheaf of quarrels rattle more loudly.

Baze hisses a warning to Chirrut just before they hit the end of the tunnel, and Chirrut slows, waiting for Baze’s signal. For secrecy, Baze has lit no torch, relying on Chirrut to lead the way, and allowing his own eyes to adjust to the dark. That is to his advantage: he spots an Imperial guard forty feet away, squatting over a hole in the ground in the dark. The other guards are standing by a wall, lit up by their cooking fire, staying near it with the attitude of men who care more about keeping warm than about keeping watch.

Baze relays all this to Chirrut in a whisper, describing direction, distance, obstacles in their way. 

“So they are in the reading hall?” Chirrut murmurs.

“Two of the walls are gone,” Baze points out. “It’s not really a hall anymore.”

Chirrut frowns.

“If they’re on schedule,” Baze says, “they’ll move around the east side in an hour.”

Chirrut looks thoughtful. “I can work with that,” he says. 

They skirt the edge of the temple, keeping out of sight – their aim is the top of the temple steps, at the path before the entry. A little further up that path and they should be out of sight and hearing of both patrols. But it won’t be for long. 

This is a stupid idea, Baze thinks to himself as they scurry along. This is ridiculous. This is impossible. There is no way they are not going to have to fight their way out. What does spilling enemy blood do to a consecration? What does interrupting the ritual do? What does attempting the ritual with two people, neither of whom is the Abbot, one of whom renounced all of this, in a ruin—

Chirrut looks focused, intent on his goal; the lines of his face are harsh in the moonlight. Baze swallows his doubts. He is not here for himself.

They make it to the top of the temple steps. They're out of sight of the first patrol, and should be well away from the second for now, but it's so open here, so exposed. The ruin of the temple looms before them, all shadow, its broken walls and pillars like jagged teeth. There is the step where the Abbot was dragged out and executed; there is the outer wall the Imperial engineers had to knock down in order to remove the Dragon's body. Baze looks away from it. 

Below them, the Holy City is spread out: a jumble of towers and streets lit by a thousand lamps and cooking fires, like an altar covered in candles.

There is a clank behind him, and he returns his attention to Chirrut, who unwraps the chain of the censer from around his waist, muffling it with his hands as best he can. It must be near midnight. The censer makes a scraping noise when Chirrut opens it. Baze, angling his body to block the night breeze, grips his flint and steel and strikes sparks over the tallow ball inside. Sparks catch on the ragged weave. The ball begins to smoulder. The smell it sends up is...

Yes, Baze thinks, his mind and his heart years away from one another. That is what New Year in the temple smells like.

Chirrut closes the censer and lets it swing from one hand, and Baze touches his chin and then kisses him. Chirrut's serious expression vanishes; he leans in, warm and close, and when they part he leans his forehead against Baze's and hums, very quietly.

Out in the city, there is a peal of bells. It is midnight. Chirrut steps back, calm now, and lets the censer swing in a slow arc, trailing smoke. Baze puts the flint away and unravels the end of the wool, its vivid scarlet dye washed to grey in the dark. Chirrut begins to sing, low and calm, in the old tongue, and walks with measured steps up the path towards the temple. Baze, at his heels, winds the thread around his finger and keeps his dark-adapted eyes open for any sign, any movement of an enemy.

On the morning of every New Year, the acolytes would wake up to find red thread twined around the pillars of the temple, strung across doorways, trailing up the steps. It was a game to spend the next few days ducking under it, leaving it in place until the holiday was over. Since the thread was unbroken, it was easy to trace a route from the start of the ceremony to the end of it, so this, at least, is no mystery to Baze. He knows the path the thread must take.

The red thread goes around the pillars of the door, a thin barrier between the temple and the outside world; no matter that the door was broken down and has long since been removed. The thread zig-zags through the entrance hall as Chirrut makes a circuit with the censer, leaving its fragrant smoke in every corner. It goes left, into the feast hall, where Chirrut's voice echoes unnervingly loud; down the stairs into the kitchens, where Baze takes Chirrut's elbow to guide him over the debris-strewn floor. At the door to the kitchen garden Baze winds the thread around the lintel, and Chirrut goes singing into the weeds and dust.

They're up in the northwest tower when Chirrut's voice falters for a moment; Baze strains his ears and hears it too: muffled conversation down below, not outside the temple walls but within. Guards have found the red thread, and are following it. Baze goes to the window, peering down, trying to see them in the myriad little courtyards, or else pinpoint their location by ear. He sees a glow of torchlight. "They're in the feast hall," he murmurs.

Chirrut resumes the song, and continues down the stairs at an unhurried pace. Baze draws his sword, and follows.

It's a strange chase; Baze can hear the Imperial guards arguing in other halls, trying to follow the tangle of thread as it loops back and forth, crossing over itself, winding up towers and down stairs. Chirrut, clearly, has no intention of fleeing or hiding. He sings quietly, but if the guards come near they will still hear him. Baze, still holding the thread, is starting to feel frustrated and a little foolish. Either they fight or they get out of here. Finishing, at this point, seems as ludicrous as beginning did a year ago.

Down the cellar steps they go, to the well under the bath-house, and Baze realises they are reaching the end of the line. Beyond here are the caves that go deep into the mountainside. Nobody below the rank of Master was ever allowed down there - not that it stopped the Imperial forces. Beyond this point is the Dragon's lair. The voices behind them are louder; Baze can hear the scrape and clatter of feet. 

The thread runs out. 

Baze balks at the cavern entrance. The last loop of thread slips between his fingers and falls noiselessly to the floor. Chirrut never ceases his chant; he finds Baze's empty hand, tangles their fingers together, and tugs him through.

It is utterly dark, and Baze can no longer see anything. The floor is gritty and uneven, and he falters, but Chirrut's feet are unerring. The smell of the incense is thick, here, though it must surely burn out soon. Ahead he can hear the jingle of the censer's silver chain, and Chirrut's steady breath. Behind, he hears the guards. The tinny quality of their voices changes tenor - they have entered the caverns too.

Chirrut turns a corner, still leading him, and Baze has the uncanny impression of space to his left; it's in the quality of air on his cheek, he thinks, and the way the sounds they make stop bouncing back, and a pressure change that almost makes his ears pop. He hears pebbles that their feet kick up go skittering away and down, down, down. The air stirs, and lifts, and Baze gropes for the wall on his right, feeling he might pitch into the yawning space beyond if he isn't careful. Baze turns his head behind them, and amidst the pitch blackness he sees the dim glow of torchlight reflecting off rocks - the guards are closing in. 

Baze grips Chirrut’s hand tight. He means to urge him on, but Chirrut stops instead, suddenly, pulling Baze back against the rock wall. “Oh,” Chirrut whispers. “No. Really?”

Baze barely has enough time to feel bewilderment before a roar of wind rises from the echoing place beyond. It drowns out the sound of their breath, the sound of the guards, Baze's very thoughts - it hurls itself against them with tooth-rattling force, flattening them to the sloping wall. Baze looks behind him again, but all is darkness: the glow of torchlight is gone.

Suddenly, the wind stops. The cessation of pressure almost makes Baze overbalance – he hadn’t realised how hard he was leaning into the wind. He hears the guards cursing. They’re so near, they must surely be at the edge of the chasm. There’s a frantic scraping, like someone fumbling their flint and steel.

Like an indrawn breath, the wind changes direction.

The guards shout. Baze, alarmed, tugs on Chirrut's hand and they crouch down, even as the sand on the path they’re walking rattles into the chasm below. There is a scream nearby, and shouting, clattering. At least one of the guards has gone over the edge, disoriented by the dark, knocked off his feet by the wind.

The wind dies down, slowly. Baze does not know what the surviving guards are doing. He does not care.

“What—” he starts, but he cuts himself off. What happened? What was that? What do they do? Useless questions. They must get away from the guards or they’ll be trapped like rats.

“Let’s find out,” Chirrut whispers back, passing him the censer and taking his stick from off his back. Baze hears this and hears the distant, fading sounds of pebbles cascading into the chasm, and is grateful when Chirrut finds Baze’s hand again and tugs him along. Slowly, cautiously, they creep deeper into the cavern.

It occurs to Baze that he has a lamp in his pack, the one he filled with the sheep’s tallow. He has a tinderbox. He could make a light. He will make a light, as soon as they stop, so he can see. He’s not entirely sure why he doesn’t call a halt. Only that he desperately wants to move forward. Only that he has an absurd idea that no light could penetrate this darkness; that it would do nothing but dazzle him. Chirrut has his hand, and his footsteps sound sure, so Baze follows.

After a while he is sure they have come to the bottom of a great chasm. There is noise far above like trickling water, drops resounding off stone. The ground beneath is fine sand. Chirrut slows, and halts.

“What is it?” Baze says quietly.

“Oh, I – I just think we should stop,” Chirrut says. “Just for a moment.”

"What, are you lost?" Baze says.

Chirrut makes an indignant sound and slaps him in the chest, and then he rests his hand there. Baze covers it with his own. It is reassuring, to feel him so close. It’s cold down here – a lightless cave in winter, of course it’s cold – and through the layers of Baze’s clothing Chirrut’s hand bleeds warmth.

“Can you hear it?” Chirrut says, apropos of nothing, and the back of Baze’s neck prickles.

 _Hear what_? Baze almost says. Before he can, the air of the cave blows over his head. The wind changes direction, blowing back now, bringing with it the scent of cold earth and wet stone, enough to almost drown out the scent of incense that rises all around them. 

"It's just the wind," he whispers. Nothing else is down here. Nothing else could be. He tells himself that and believes it, until the wind moves again - first one direction, then the other.

It is as if some giant creature behind him is breathing. 

Baze turns around, feeling his eyes strain wide though he knows there is no light to see by. He forgets to grip the censer, and the chain slips through his fingers; it comes to rest on the sand with a shiver of clinking silver that seems far too loud.

Something massive is approaching. He hears its breath, now, not merely some underground draft. He hears its footsteps, which he can no longer mistake for pebbles spilling down the cavern walls. 

Fear grips him, but he can't seem to move. "Chirrut," he says urgently.

Chirrut grips his hand, and threads their fingers together. Ludicrously, he sings a little of the consecration hymn.

It is enough to make Baze consider something inconceivable. Baze thinks of the Dragon, and her clutches of eggs down deep in the caverns where only Masters and the Abbot dared set foot. How far down did the Imperial soldiers come? When they slew her and broke into her lair to steal her children, did they check everywhere?

Did they miss one?

Breath blows over them again. Shaking, Baze reaches out into the dark.

There is a long moment of silence. Then a gust of warm air over his fingertips. And then—oh, then—

The dragon’s hide is warm, and smooth like polished stone. It presses against his hand, and stays there. 

Baze gasps. Beside him, Chirrut leans against him and touches Baze’s chest, his arm, skims up his wrist, and feels what Baze feels.

“Oh,” Chirrut says. He sounds choked.

The dragon breathes, and makes a low, soft noise that makes the sand beneath their feet shiver, and small stones clatter down from above. Baze feels it rattle through every part of his body. 

“How long have you been down here, my friend?” Chirrut asks. His voice is coloured with regret.

Baze holds his breath, but the dragon gives no sign of anger. It rumbles again, a crooning sound. 

Baze does not know what is happening inside himself. It feels like sensation returning to a numbed limb, strange and painful. He remembers standing at the temple walls until he was sure that all his actions, present and past, were futile. He thought he knew what it felt like to be wrong. He thinks of water trickling over earth that has become as dry and hard as stone. 

It pushes a little closer, until Baze rests his forehead against its snout.

He has not wept in fourteen years, so he resents his eyes for the way they prickle now. His heart is pounding. He wants to get out. He wants daylight. He wants to see this dragon with his own eyes, and know it’s real.

The dragon pulls away from him, and he almost apologises for his thoughts. His hand, raised over his head, skims off its face and over what must be its neck. The dragon steps forward - the front foot sounds like it fell very near him - and then with a groan, it crouches down.

Chirrut gasps. Then he tugs on Baze's hand. “Come on!” he says. 

Baze is frozen on the spot. He has a very clear impression in his mind of what to do, but he never in his life pictured himself doing it. But Chirrut’s voice is full of excitement, and Baze doesn't think he has mistaken the dragon's intent.

“Oh, dammit,” he says suddenly, “I dropped the censer.” It’s somewhere behind them. It might take a while to find.

“It’s just an object,” Chirrut laughs. “It doesn’t matter. We could probably use a basket on a rope and it would work as well. Come _on_.”

Chirrut goes up first, scrambling nimbly up as if he has been riding dragons through lightless caverns all his life. Baze follows. It feels unbelievably forward to clamber up onto this beast’s back as if it’s a horse, but refusing would be just as rude. It is a slightly terrifying ascent when he doesn’t know how far up its back is, and his weapons clack against each other like the useless encumbrance they currently are, but he reaches the dragon’s shoulder, and finds a seat upon its broad back. “Chirrut?” he says.

“Here,” Chirrut says from behind him, and wraps his arms around Baze’s waist. 

There is a heave of motion, and Baze is afraid for a moment that he is going to topple off, but he lays his hands against the pebbly hide to balance himself, and the dragon surges forward.

Wind rushes past Baze’s face, almost swallowing up the sound of Chirrut cackling behind him. The sound of the moving dragon echoes up the cavern walls and thunders around them. Baze squeezes his eyes shut and holds on, trying to lean into the swooping dips and scrabbling leaps. He cannot tell how long it takes. He only knows that this network of caves is larger than he ever thought.

Eventually, the dragon slows. Baze opens his eyes, for all the good it will do. The echoes do not last as long, here. He thinks they have come to a narrower part of the cavern – a tunnel not much larger than the dragon.

At first, Baze is not sure he is seeing at all, or if it is a trick of the mind, but no – there is a faint light, growing brighter all the time. He begins to see the edges of rocks, the surface of the tunnel walls. He sees, in silhouette, the shape of the dragon’s head, and that squashes some last little bit of doubt inside him.

The dragon stops. Baze breathes for a moment, and feels the dragon breathing underneath him, Chirrut pressed against his back. Then, with a sigh like a night breeze, the dragon crouches down. The ride is over. It’s time to go.

Chirrut murmurs a prayer, and slips down to the ground. Baze reluctantly follows. His descent is a little less graceful. His feet hit the sandy floor and he grunts at the ground shock.

He can see Chirrut’s face, now. He has that calm and peaceful look, though there are tear tracks on his cheeks. He reaches out his hand again, and Baze takes it.

They walk, and the dragon follows them a little way. Baze is almost afraid to look back, as if it will disappear if he does.

They turn the corner, and the light sears Baze’s eyes. He stumbles to a stop, and Chirrut stops beside him. The sky is bright, to say the least. It’s day. Beyond them is the forest.

Baze turns back, and just out of the light is the dragon. Its hide is every colour of stone, and Baze thinks, _not it – she_. She is smaller than her mother – but that is to be expected. The Dragon was ancient. This one – Baze thinks this one is barely more than a child.

She takes a deep breath, and Baze plants his feet to stay standing - the trees in the forest behind them rattle as the wind shakes the bare branches. Her sides swell like a bellows. Then she opens her mouth - such teeth! - and breathes out a cloud. For a moment, Baze can't see at all through the mist. Her breath is warm, but the moisture chills rapidly on his face, and forms beads of water on his clothing.

The cloud moves through the forest, ribboning around trees, dispersing over the ground. Trees in the distance disappear. Droplets form on the trunks and branches and patter on the dry earth. Chirrut waves his fingers through the air, catching the water that collects on his hand, grinning.

“We’ll come back,” Baze blurts out. He feels a little foolish, giddy almost, but the dragon lowers her head, and allows him to touch her again, and he feels that maybe that was the right thing to say.

"We will," Chirrut says, shaking the water off his hand before he touches her snout. "Every month, if you want. And next year, we’ll bring the sheep!”

The dragon snorts, and Baze has a brief impression of – of something like _kindness_ – before she retreats again into the darkness. They watch her go, and then stand listening, straining their ears until there is nothing competing with the sounds of the forest behind them.

“Chirrut,” Baze says. To his own ears, he sounds hoarse.

Chirrut turns around, and pulls Baze to him. His stick clatters on the ground and his arms wrap tightly around Baze’s waist. Baze holds him just as fiercely.

“What are we going to do?” he says. An ancient and powerful dragon could not stand against the Empire before. A temple full of Guardians could not help her. This dragon is young and they have just volunteered themselves to her service, and they are only two people. How will they keep her safe?

“We will find a way,” Chirrut says. “Don’t we always?” His face is as optimistic as it always is, and Baze doesn’t have the heart to argue.

He picks up Chirrut’s stick off the ground, and puts it in his hand. When he looks up, through the mist, he can see the Holy City far above the trees. It’ll be a long walk yet before they’re home. And then – oh, then—

They’ll have to buy another damn sheep.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Now that names are revealed, I've got to give enormous credit to Morbane for the beta job she did, which, in addition to curbing my excessive reliance on semicolons, included an offhand suggestion that made me write a whole new ending. THANK YOU!


End file.
